[D365 CE Online] Debug Async Plug-in using “Persist to Entity” profiler option
As you are aware, using Plug-in Profiler option we can debug D365 online plug-ins by throwing exception and capturing the Serilaized profile. Refer my previous article
With the ‘Exception’ profiling option, you first need to trigger the event and capture the exception log. For example, if you need to debug “Post Account Create” plug-in, you first need to trigger the event (i.e., Create Account from D365 application) and capture the exception log. This ‘Exception’ option would be apt, if your plug-in registered in Sync mode.
What if your plug-in is Async? Answer is, using “Persist to Entity” profiler option.
Let’s see how to debug Async Plug-in step by step.
Configuring Profiler in Plugin Registration Tool:
- Connect to your Dynamics instance using Plug-in registration tool.
- Click on ‘Install Profiler’ button
- Register a new plug-in assembly and add an Async step
- In this article, I registered an Async step on Post Account Creation
- Select the Plug-in step and click on ‘Start Profiling’
- In the “Profiler Settings” screen, choose “Persist to Entity” option and click “OK”
Trigger Account Creation from D365 Application:
- Connect to D365 application and create a new Account
- As we opted for “Persist to Entity” profiler option, an entry will get created in “Settings -> Plug-in Profiles” entity.
- Go to “Settings -> Plug-in Profiles”, open the newly created “Plug-in Profile” record (Note: Async plug-in takes time to create a new “Plug-in Profile” record).
- In the “Plug-in Profile” record, you would notice the Serialized content in “Serialized Profile” field. This is same as what you get in Exception download log if you would have opted for “Exception” profile setting.
Debug the Plug-in:
Once an entry got created in “Plug-in Profile” record
- Open the Plug-in class file in Visual Studio and attach “Plug-in Registration Tool” process
- Add a break point in your Plug-in class file to debug.
- Open the “Plugin Registration Tool”
- Select the Plug-in step and click on “Debug/REPLAY PLUG-IN EXECUTION” button
- In the “Replay Plug-in Execution” screen, set
- Profile = Click on ‘Down Arrow’ button to pick your “Plug-in Profile” record from D365 (Refer screen)
- Assembly Location = Plug-in dll
- Plugin = Class Name
- Click on “Start Execution”
- You should see a break point hit in Visual Studio.
- Press F10 to proceed with debugging.
🙂
[D365 CE] – Error while registering the plug-in assembly
Other day I got an error while registering a new Plug-in assembly
Reason:
- Its Plug-in assembly .Net Framework version issue.
- My plug-in class library defaulted to 4.6.1 version where as Dynamics 365 requires version 4.5.2 of the .NET Framework for plugin assemblies
Fix:
- Its a simple fix, open your Plug-in ‘Class library’ project in Visual Studio
- Go to Properties and change the .Net Framework to 4.5.2
- Save and Build solution
- Try registering the plug-in and it should work now.
🙂
Dynamics Portal – ‘No list could be found with the relative URL’ Error – Fix
Recently I was working on Dynamics Portals and SharePoint integration and while uploading the document from ‘Case’ entity, I was getting below error
Reason:
- ‘Document Management’ was not enabled for ‘Case’ entity.
Fix:
- Make sure ‘Document Management’ is enabled for ‘Case’ entity
- Connect to Dynamics 365 Application
- Open Settings -> Customizations -> Customize the System
- Select ‘Case’ Entity and make sure ‘Document Management’ is checked.
- Go to Settings -> Document Management Settings
- In the ‘Select entities’ grid, make sure ‘Case’ entity is selected.
- Click ‘Next’ and ‘Select folder structure’
- Click ‘Next’ to complete the set up
- Try uploading the document from Portal and should be able to upload the document.
- Try restarting the Portal if you still getting the exception.
🙂
[Step By Step] Dynamics Portals – SharePoint Integration
In this article I am going to walk you through the step by step process to integrate Dynamics Portal with SharePoint.
Why we need to integrate Portal with SharePoint?
- To answer the question, lets take a scenario, A company has an Employee Health portal where employees upload their Medical Bills and diagnostic reports to reimburse the money incurred due to hospitalization. On the other side Companies admin team access the documents either from D365 application or SharePoint portal to validate and release the money.
- If the documents get uploaded to SharePoint through the Portal, with the robust SharePoint document management features, the documents can be edited, versioned and accessed anywhere online just from a browser.
Now lets see the steps to integrate portals with SharePoint.
Pre-requisites:
- Dynamics 365 subscription (Get 30 days trail)
- SharePoint Site
- Dynamics Portal
Configure SharePoint Site:
- Once you have your Dynamics 365 subscription, login to your Office 365
- Click on ‘SharePoint’ link to connect to SharePoint Portal
- Next step is to create a new ‘Site’
- Click on ‘Create Site’ and fill the details to complete Site creation.
- Copy the URL which you would need in next steps.
- I created a new site with name ‘D365’
Configure SharePoint Site in D365 Application:
After creation of SharePoint Site in previous section, now we need to add this details in D365
- Open your Dynamics Application
- Go to Settings -> Document Management Settings
- In the ‘Document Management Settings’ window, paste the SharePoint Site URL copied in previous section in ‘SharePoint Site:‘ text box.
- In the ‘Select entities’ grid, select the entities you would like to add Documents from your portal.
- I selected ‘Case’ entity as I am using in this article
- Click ‘Next’ and ‘Select folder structure’
- Click ‘Next’ to complete the set up.
- Connect to Dynamics 365 Administration Center
- Select your Portal from ‘Applications’ and click on ‘Manage’
- Click on ‘Set up SharePoint integration’ -> Enable SharePoint integration
- Provide credentials and complete the set up
Configure ‘Case’ entity portal form and Entity Permissions:
To be able to upload documents from Portal, we need to add a sub-grid on Case form.
- Connect to Dynamics 365 Application
- Open Settings -> Customizations -> Customize the System
- Select ‘Case’ Entity and make sure ‘Document Management’ is checked.
- Open ‘Case -> Forms -> Web-Edit Case‘ form
- Note: As I am going to upload documents from existing Case in Portal, I chosen ‘Web-Edit Case’ form. Chose your from as per the requirement.
- Add a new sub-grid with below details.
- Entity – Document Locations
- Save and Publish.
Lets grant ‘Entity Permissions’ to ‘Sharepointdocumentlocation’ entity whoever having access to ‘Case’ entity.
- Navigate ‘Portals -> Entity Permissions’
- As I am planning to upload documents from ‘Case’ entity, I am selecting ‘Customer Service – Cases where contact is customer‘ entity permission.
- Add a new ‘Child Entity Permission’ on ‘Sharepointdocumentlocation’ entity and grant below privileges.
- Save and Close.
How to upload the documents from Portal:
Once you made all the configurations, we are all set to upload the documents.
- Connect to your portal
- Create a new Case or open an existing Case
- Navigate to the ‘Document Location’ sub-grid and click ‘Add Files’
- Upload the document
- You should see the uploaded document in the sub-grid.
🙂
Dynamics Portals – Restricting portal access by IP address
The Dynamics 365 Portal is public when provisioned and accessible by anyone from any computer. Now we can restrict access to the portal from a list of IP addresses using ‘Set up IP address restriction’ page from your Portal Administration screen.
How it works:
- To allow access to a portal from an IP address or a set of IP addresses, you can add the ‘Public’ IP addresses to the list. This allows the portal to be accessed only from the list of added IP addresses. If no IP address added, the portal will be accessible from all IP addresses.
- When a request to the portal is generated from any user, their IP address is evaluated against the allow list. If the IP address is not on the list, the portal displays a web page with an HTTP 403 status code.
- Only Public IP addresses are allowed and Private IP address can’t be accessed by the portal.
- If you try to access the portal from any other IP addresses, access will be denied and a web page with an HTTP 403 status code is displayed.
Steps to Add/Remove IP Addresses:
- Login to your Dynamics 365 Administration Center
- You must be having a Office 365 Global Administrator/ Dynamics 365 Service Administrator
- Select your Instance and go to ‘Applications’ tab.
- Select the ‘Portal Add-on’ from the ‘Applications’ list and click ‘Manage’
- From the Portal Administration screen, select ‘Set up IP address restriction’
- Click on + to add new IP address
- To remove the IP address, use X from the grid.
🙂
Dynamics 365 – New Admin Center (Preview)
Have you noticed the Try the new Admin center link when you connected to your Dynamics 365 Admin Center?
When you click on the link, you will be redirected to ‘Admin Center (Preview)’ built on Power platform.
Click on the Instance name (i.e.,MS) in above screen, will take you Instance Details page.
Click on ‘See all‘ to get the ‘Details’ pane.
Click on ‘Edit‘ to get ‘Settings’ edit pane where you can change the Instance Type (i.e., Production/Sandbox)
I started exploring and one standout feature so far is ‘Settings’ page where you can manage all your Admin related configurations (i.e., Short cuts) in one page.
To go to ‘Settings’ page, you first need to select the ‘Instance’ and click on ‘Settings’ button.
🙂
SQL Server- Troubleshoot ‘String or binary data would be truncated’ error
In one of my Data Migration requirement, I had to join data from multiple tables and move to a single table. Requirement is complex as data is around 20 GB and table has around 300 columns.
So, I built a Stored Procedure to join tables and move data to single table, the query ran for an hour and finally failed with below error:
String or binary data would be truncated.
Reason:
- Length of the data I was trying to insert to is more than the defined column size in target table.
Fix:
- Identifying the problematic column was difficult as my source tables had 300 columns.
- To trouble the issue, I ran a query on my source tables to get max data length of all columns, which helped me to identify the mismatched column.
- Below query helped me to identify the maximum data length of source table columns
DECLARE @SQLStatement VARCHAR(MAX);
DECLARE @TableName sysname;
–Set your table name here
SET @TableName = ‘Product‘;
SET @SQLStatement = ”;SELECT @SQLStatement = @SQLStatement + ‘SELECT ‘ + QUOTENAME(cols.name, ””) + ‘ AS ”Column Name”, ‘ + QUOTENAME(types.name, ””) + ‘ AS ”Data Type”, ‘ +
QUOTENAME(cols.max_length, ””) + ‘ AS ”Defined Length”, MAX(DATALENGTH(‘ + QUOTENAME(cols.name) + ‘)) AS ”Max Data Length” FROM ‘+@TableName+ char(10) +’ UNION ‘
FROM
SYS.COLUMNS cols
JOIN
SYS.TYPES types
ON
types.system_type_id = cols.system_type_id and types.name != ‘sysname’
WHERE
cols.OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID(@TableName);SET @SQLStatement = LEFT(@SQLStatement, LEN(@SQLStatement)-6)
— Execute SQL statement
EXEC(@SQLStatement)
- To simplify the understanding I created a ‘Product’ table with 4 columns and added few rows
- Execute the query and it lists out ‘Column Name’,’Data Type’, ‘Defined Column Length’ and ‘Max Data Length’.
- In the below result, my ‘Description’ column’s max data length is 142
🙂
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